Strange Shakespeare

Elizabeth Boyd, a forgotten 18th-century playwright, probably played an important role in the idea for the monument of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey.

Women played a key role in creating, promoting, and ultimately undermining “Vortigern” and William Henry Ireland’s other Shakespeare forgeries.

Charles Somerset’s “Shakspeare’s Early Days” of 1829 was a prototype of the Shakespearean biopic and also a critique of the theatrical establishment.

Actor Edmund Kean’s more sympathetic portrayal of Shylock onstage in the early 19th century connected with the Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza’s merciful defeat of an English champion.

Shakespeare’s witches haven’t always terrified audiences. For a century and more – from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries – actors played these parts for laughs. During the period in which Shakespeare became “the Bard”, the witches in fact brought a large dose of comedy to Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy. The origins of this surprising, but long-lasting, stage interpretation go back to 1664.

Shakespeare became the Bard of Avon, the English national poet, in the roughly two hundred years following his death in 1616. During this period, his plays were constantly staged in theaters throughout the British Isles and their colonies—but often in forms that we would be hard pressed to recognize as “Shakespearean.” The Tempest is a particularly interesting case in point.